


Waiting is hard, but it's all we can do.

by TheMermaidLord



Category: Supernatural
Genre: But it's there, M/M, Sabriel - Freeform, also pretentious, everything i write is pretentious, gabe and cas are the humans, i guess, it's not dwelled upon, role-reversal au, sam and dean are angels, slight self harm, you can probably find destiel in there if you try your hardest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 22:36:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4683881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMermaidLord/pseuds/TheMermaidLord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Archangel Samuel, from Gabriel's point of view.</p><p>(this has been waiting for ages until I finally decided there was nothing in my power I could do to make it less crap)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting is hard, but it's all we can do.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically if the Winchesters had been the angels.
> 
> With a 'few' liberties to the plot.
> 
> Also wings are visible because I say so.
> 
> So essentially this is a mishmash of aus and angst strained through a keyboard. That I've been messing around with for a while and never really managed to improve.

Gabriel can't even pinpoint the moment that Sam slipped into his life, through closely guarded bars entwined with misery and responsibilities.

He can remember the first time he hears Sam's name. Unknowing of this beautiful angel with those hypnotising eyes, Gabriel is half listening to Dean, back when he was still Adeandriel, untrusted and impossible and not a friend, not family. He's talking about his closest brother, the archangel Samuel, who left all those years ago. He talks about how Samuel flies, spiralling on the tips of chestnut wings that held the brightest colour before the Father had even invented colour.

He talks about the few times Sam allowed himself to be free, to steal off to the earth for days on end and escape his duties with the flick of a wing so beautiful, Dean says the world stopped spinning. Of course Dean, being Dean, manages to say so in fewer words, that manage to convey no emotion at the same time as more than human voices could ever hope to capture.

And then the seraph talks about how Samuel watched his brother, Lucifer, turn from flickering warmth to the icy heat of evil and revenge, and Michael withdraw into himself, as stony as the peaks below that it was his job to shape. And Raphael, who turns from the sharp tongued healer to the soldier, a blade of his Father's will sharper than steel and faster than Samuel knew how to catch up with, dancing with life and death on the knife edge over the Abyss.

And Samuel, seeing this, who could have melted into the heat of his anger and blasted the heavens with his wrath until there was no fighting, and no conflict, simply decided to burn a little brighter. To give the rest of his siblings, including Adeandriel, a little flicker of warmth in this new era of mysteries and absences.

And then came the day Samuel watched his brothers pecking at and destroying each other, like crows over a carcass, and he turns around and learns how to be selfish. And he spends the day with Dean, and flies with him and tells him stories, and in the evening he disappears. They never felt him Fall, but then Samuel had never been one for dramatic gestures.

Gabriel remembers thinking that on that they differ.

He also remembers thinking that they don't really need to know this, and if the guy's dead how is he supposed to help them stop the damn apocalypse? Why do they care? Later, when he recalls these questions, he'll meet them with a mirthless laugh on his lips and an eye-roll, but that's later.

And of course he remembers the first time he sees Sam, but then it would be hard not to.

Gabriel's being pressed up against a peeling wall by a nameless demon, trying to keep the knife away from his neck. Dean's wings are flapping wildly, a blur of white and grey and hazel, as the opposition try to surround him, eyes flashing like liquid charcoal. He was never particularly familiar with conflict, even before he met them, and you can see traces of it in his panic and ungracefulness as he attempts to reach Cas, who's slumped in a corner, forgotten, for now.

The knife twists, and Gabriel's hold on it is lost as well as the tips of two fingers, and he tries to pull away but the demon is looming over him, those black eyes the last thing he'll ever see. And then the tip of an angel blade passes through it's stomach and the thing slumps over and Gabriel's too stunned to do anything but sit there panting quietly and watching his saviour disassemble the remainder of the attacking force. He, and it is a he, is tall, remarkably tall, and is quite obviously an angel.

Gabriel's first surprise is when his vision clears enough to see that there are not two wings protruding from this newcomer's back, but six, each one broad and proud with a faint upwards flick at the end. In his experience, the best way to read an angel's mood is through his wings and, sure enough, as the last demon topples to the ground, they slot against each other and fold in to his back, impossibly sleek and beautiful. The joins to his back are a muddy green blue- murky without being ugly and striking without looking out of place. These soft, downy feathers fade into a beautiful chestnut brown, and right at the tip of the wing, where it flicks, abruptly into grey-white. He has a feeling staring too long at an angel's wings is considered inappropriate, so, with difficulty, Gabriel turns his gaze to where Cas lies, unconscious but breathing.

His second surprise is when Adeandriel looks up, shaking, and whispers in a rare show of emotion. "Sam?"

The rest, as they say, is history. Samuel stays long enough to heal them and bring them back to the cheap motel, and have a conversation, quick, heartfelt, and utterly silent, with Dean. And then he gets them takeaway, before apologising for taking so long and saying he needs to go now, having effectively just revealed his presence to the entire world as well as his side in this war. Gabriel can say, completely unbiased, that Sam is the most adorable angel he's ever met. He doesn't, of course because he knows the exact reception that will get. What he does say is that Sam isn't what he expected. Although, technically, he defied expectations just by showing up.

Gabriel honestly remembers doubting Sam will come back. He'll look back and laugh at that too. Because Sam does come back. Again and again and again.

He comes back to help Gabriel with the demon blood. He comes back to help protect the seals. The one time he doesn't come back is when Lucifer rises, because Zachariah has sent a whole garrison of angels to keep him away. He turns up two days later, with tears in his grace and a vessel nearly ripped apart, and he's been crying. And they open the door and let him in, angelic beacon or no, because somewhere along the line he snuck into their little family.

Gabriel just can't pinpoint when.

The real answer isn't anything special. Two days before the third seal that breaks under their watch, Sam appears and gives them an update, and some fries. There isn't enough to go around properly, and they're lukewarm at best, but they pass them round and discuss plans, and suddenly, Samuel is Sam and he's a part of their life now, and it's too late to do anything about it.

Gabriel doesn't know that. He knows when the idea of Sam entered his life, he knows when the angel himself entered, but he doesn't know when Samuel became part of it.

One thing he does know is when he left it.

Gabe and Cas had pulled over to the Elysian Fields, luxury in the middle of a maelstrom of pain and fatigue and cheap motels. There were few staff and fewer customers, and no sex noises through the walls, and a buffet, and a decent quality bed, but not separate rooms because their levels of codependence hadn't toned down that much yet. Dean was off trying to recruit angels to their cause, which was his code for stirring up trouble in heaven, but if he was here he'd of insisted on watching the full collection of Casa Erotica the hotel was insisting on providing. And then of course they found the human fridge and the bodies and the gods, and they were tied to chairs being inspected by a Hindu goddess before Gabriel had even had a chance to try the free massage.

When they were dragged downstairs to be displayed in front of the gods, the brothers got a bit of a surprise. Sitting at the long table, surrounded by pagans eating human flesh in varying degrees of rawness, poking at a Caesar salad, looking supremely uncomfortable, and wearing a name tag that read Loki was Sam. His wings weren't visible, but still if they hadn't been gagged, he would have been found out. Luckily Cas had the presence of mind to kick him before Gabriel could do anything more obvious than stare.

The pagans were talking about killing Lucifer, and Gabriel would have laughed if he had been able, but he made do with an eye roll. Someone snapped them back to the room, and before they could do much more than stare at each other Sam was there, looking resigned.

"So, you've got questions. Shoot."

Gabriel realised that of course Sam must have been doing something in the millennia he was missing from heaven, but he had been imagining more hermit-meditation crap. Loki was something that they hunted. And then out came the 'thing' with Kali, and Gabriel made himself busy with pretending that he wasn't jealous. Because he wasn't. Sam told them about Kali's blood-bind, and they made a plan, and for a few treasured moments it was just another hunt, and nothing was wrong at all, and there was still a future beyond the apocalypse for a hundred more hunts like it, with Sam by his side.

Until it wasn't. And it was. And there wasn't.

Someone had betrayed the pagans, of course they had, and now Sam, being Sam, being stupid, noble, beautiful Sam, was going to protect them. Of course he was. His wings had unfolded, their feathers catching a sheen of light like tens of silver daggers, which ripped two holes in the back of his shirt, and Sam was dashing for the door, half running, half flying, and Gabriel couldn't keep up.

When he got downstairs the walls were splattered with pagans, and Gabriel saw the tip of Sam's wings disappear through the door. Kali swept past him, running for the exit, and Cas was tugging at his jacket, shouting something he couldn't hear, and he shrugged his brother off. Gabriel stood in the doorway, Cas hanging back, not wanting to come closer but certainly not going to leave.

He watched as Sam approached the devil, archangel blade shaking. Lucifer turned to face him, his white wings almost too bright to look at and splattered with blood.

"They're all saying you're dead, you know. Dead or a coward. But then labels never mattered to you much, did they?"

"You killed the pagans."

"I did, yes. They were planning on killing me. Are you going to make the same mistake?"

They were circling each other now, slowly.

"I don't have any other choice."

"Yes you do, Samuel. Loki. Whoever you want to be, you're still my brother. Join me, and I will reward you in ways you cannot imagine."

"I already have my rewards, brother. Their names are Dean, Cas and Gabriel."

Reward no. 3 completely missed how cheesy that was in favour of shivering over the way Sam said his name.

"And I prefer Sam."

Apparently that was enough for Lucifer. He raised his blade to throw, aiming for the heart. Sam raised his knife to block. And the Morning Star smirked, and threw the knife, a twisting spear of silver...

... which whistled past Sam, and headed straight for Gabriel's chest. And then Sam was moving, a blur of chestnut and green, and in the time it took him to move Gabriel's eyes widened a fraction and the knife thudded into Sam's stomach, the angel frozen in a wild dive to save Gabriel's life.

Lucifer disappeared with a wink, and the Archangel Samuel thudded to the ground with a sad little smile, and someone screamed and Gabriel thinks it might have been him, and he's on the ground pulling Sam into his lap and he thinks Cas might be there, saying something, anything, and Sam is trying to pull away, because he knows what happens when an angel dies, but Gabriel doesn't care, because this is all his fault and he deserves all the pain in the world. He deserves to be the one lying, wings broken, on the floor.

"I'm sorry." so quiet it's almost missed, and the smile is still there and Gabriel's crying, now, and there's a bright light, and a pain in his chest so intense he feels like he's liquidising, and someone's screaming, a quiet, hoarse thing barely legible over the tide that's crashing inside Gabriel's skull, and he curls up around the empty shell that's the vessel that once held Sam, the closest Gabriel will ever be to him again, and he knows that it should be him, and that if he had a choice, it would be.

 _Later_ , Cas will pick him up, crying, and drive him away, just away, himself lying across the back seat, too numb to care, and they'll check in to some motel somewhere, and he'll be lying down on the scabby bed and thinking 'it should've been me.'

 _Later_ , he'll hear the worst sound imaginable torn from Dean's lips, animal and broken, and he'll collapse into a chair and try to block out the world, and he doesn't have to be an angel to know that Dean's thinking 'it should've been you.'

 _Later_ , the other two will be holding each other tight on the single bed, together in grief, and Gabriel will be lying on his back, digging his fingers into the seeping wound on his chest that will one day scar into an exact replica of his angel's wings, and silently thanking Sam for his last gift, the agony that Gabriel should bear as long as he lives, as a cost for being the one to do so. 'It should've been me.'

 _Later_ , they will allow themselves twenty four hours of mourning, before forcing themselves to get on with it, for Sam, and Gabriel will learn to put on a smile and block out the world and dig deeper. 'It should've been me.'

 _Later_ , they'll find out that Lucifer needs Gabe alive, that he wouldn't have let him die, that that knife was always meant for Sam and Sam alone, that Lucifer was just trying to find the most painful way to kill him. That's the day that Gabriel's mind becomes one-track. Kill Lucifer, or die trying. Keep the rest of your friends alive. And keep punishing yourself, even though it will never be enough. 'It should've been me.'

 _Later_ , much later, Gabriel will finally let Lucifer in, and he will meet Michael, kitted out in poor, poor Anna. Castiel will drive up in his horrible car, with Dean and Joshua, and both of them will die. And Castiel will take the beatings, and when he gets the chance he will slice down Gabriel's shirt, and expose the scar, and just for a second maybe a flicker of green runs through it, murky without being ugly, and striking without looking out of place.

And Gabriel will be Gabriel again, and he'll grab Michael, and fall into the pit, and thank Sam for what truly was his last gift. And then he'll smile, as the flames draw closer, because he'll finally be getting the punishment he deserves. A last whisper, perfectly steady, lit with hellfire. "Because it should've been me."

But maybe Sam is out there somewhere, shaking his head, because the punishment doesn't last for long.

When Gabriel gets out, he loses the habit of punishing himself, loses the habit of even thinking about Sam. He tells himself it's because he's done enough, because it's too painful, and he loses his lies in hunting and brutality. It's only one day, when he's collected enough to sit back and look at all this, that he realises something is wrong, painfully wrong, terrifyingly absolutely wrong. He tries praying, but Adeandriel doesn't answer, and Gabe takes the only option left.

He drives nine hours to find Cas, with his new girlfriend (what was it? Hannah?) and kid (Samandriel, he thinks, and laughs, because apparently Hannah has about as much baby-naming talent as the Novak parents did), and dimly wonders why he isn't bored.

Cas gets angry, as he rarely does, but in a heart-stopping cold no-raised-voices kind of way that makes shivers run down Gabriel's spine.

His brother talks a lot, says things that would crack Gabe's heart right open (and he doesn't realise why they don't) but he doesn't talk about Sam. Even now, that's off limits. He doesn't think it ever won't be.

Then Cas calls Dean, and Dean comes. Of course he does. And Gabriel finds out what's wrong with him, and isn't even surprised to find out that he doesn't care.

When that's fixed, but maybe not forgotten, and they have a new set of problems to deal with, thanks to their number one angel, and then those are fixed, and then they screw up again, and die, and then it's Dean's turn, all Gabe can think about is how many times they've messed up and how they're still alive.

'Sam never did anything except dare to side with us.'

He doesn't hate Dean, of course, he doesn't really have the energy to hate anyone anymore. Except maybe Lucifer, but then again, Lucifer tortured him like he deserves, but doesn't even have the courage to do to himself anymore. So maybe he doesn't really hate anyone.

Except himself, of course.

So they go on, fixing their screw ups and those of others, and the most recent threat has been solved, and they're sitting in the bunker, coping. Not okay, just coping. As usual.

Dean is experimenting with human cooking (Gabriel can smell smoke), Cas is absorbed in a book at the other end of the table, and Gabe is just thinking. It's a normal day, nothing is going to change, and maybe Gabriel won't ever be properly happy again.

Until it isn't. And it does. And he will.

There's a strange tingling on Gabriel's chest, over the burn, and then a sense of coolness and lightness and air. Which is impossible. Which is a fluke. Which is another hallucination, somehow, sent to torture him again. And he isn't going to look. He's not going to set himself up for disappointment and pain.

He looks.

Gabriel lifts up his t-shirt, and sees a pale expanse of skin, light muscles covered in a layer of too-much-candy, and no scars in sight.

A light scraping sound that he's barely aware of marks the chair moving back, and he's moving to the door, uncaring of anything but this beautiful hope filling his system. Castiel looks through his lashes at his brothers half smile, so rare now and unexplained, and doesn't follow him, because sometimes he thinks his brother had already gone places Cas can't follow, and now all he can do is watch and hope Gabriel finds his way back.

Gabe leaves the door open a crack behind him, and stands, maybe a foot away from it, looking round. For a full second, maybe two, nothing happens, and he can feel the hope disintegrating.

And then Samuel is standing there, in front of him and slightly to the left, facing him, his wings half-extended and trembling in the slight late-April wind, the same sad smile still on his face.

A moment passes, one man not daring to move, to disturb the illusion, one not entirely sure what to say.

"Hi?" Sam almost asks, confused and gloriously awkward, and _Sam_ , in a way that sends a tremor through Gabriel's hands and his entire world.

And then he's running for the tall man, and holding him tight, and close, and someone is crying and it's probably both of them and someone's hands are in someone's hair and the embrace becomes a kiss somewhere along the line and no one seems to mind that much and there's gasping and crying and closeness and they're okay.

They're okay.

 _Later_ , almost an hour later, Cas will look outside through the crack in the door and see Sam and Gabe sitting cross-legged in the dust by the side of the road, clasped hands resting on Sam's leg, talking, and Cas will smile, and think 'maybe he's going to be okay.'

 _Later_ , they'll come inside, after two hours of just talking. They don't talk about Sam being dead (although they will) or Gabriel being alive (although they will) or suffering or the Apocalypse or dead angels or Lucifer or Hell (although they will). They talk about the weather and and feeling happy and how blue candy is the best and coffee and humanity and warmth and beaches and space.

 _Later_ , Cas will still be reading his book, and Sam will come in and he'll have to pretend to be surprised when really he's just happy, and the thinks the archangel knows and knows that he doesn't mind.

 _Later_ , Dean will poke his head out of the smoke filled kitchen and see Sam and try a haphazard mix of flying and running and stumbling to reach him and they'll hug and talk silently for a bit before someone says something and someone laughs, and it'll all be okay, and it's just a bit easier to cope.

 _Later_ , Sam and Gabriel will sit in Gabriel's room, and talk, and talk, until the sun comes up and they'll still keep talking and kissing and laughing, but it doesn't matter, because they have all the time in the world.

_(They don't of course, and there will always be mistakes and enemies and demons and four separate, bloody, deaths that come far too soon, in a world that doesn't care, but just for now, they are perfect.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Anna plays the role of Adam, Joshua plays Bobby, and Hannah and Samandriel are Lisa and Ben. Michael and Lucifer stay the same bc there were no human roles that were really that close.
> 
> (Also Dean is in Cas' situation and Sam is in Gabriel's. Just clearing that up.)


End file.
